more loot .. want more loot .. pleeeeeeeassssssssssse ... arrrrrrrrrgggggghh !! sob sob!!!
This was on my list of anticipated games since 2010 and after finishing the campaign before the auction house came online, I felt a little disappointed with almost everything. This game demands that you have a constant internet connection or you are basically screwed from day one. Speaking of day one, it was a total disaster because I could not log in with my account and I think this was universal. Living in Nigeria and using a mobile network modem to play diablo 3 is a disaster and even in advanced societies there is nothing like an always on internet connection. Sometimes it breaks for a few seconds and comes back. When this happens, your combat suddenly stalls and your companion does not follow you anymore. All of a sudden you are hitting air and the creature you were hitting suddenly appears at your back with hundreds of others pummelling you to death when the internet is back on. WTF!!!! Most times that I died it was because of these scenarios (Internet connection). The best time to play this game was at night when people stopped hogging the bandwidth. This is appalling after paying $60.
Story wise, Diablo 3 is weak and you do not really care about the characters. There is a fallen star and apparently this star is an angel who revolted in heaven because he thinks humans need protecting from the prime evil and his ilk. This game is not about the story but about looting. I think Torchlight, a derivative of this game ruin Diablo 3 for me. The combat is good and exciting when your internet connection is steady. When you click your mouse, it responds and I particularly like killing multiple enemies at once with a special ability. I think the levelling up and choosing ability should have been better and not dumbed down. The skill menu is a little odd for my taste although it works. You get the primary and secondary skills which means left click and right mouse clicks. Each has four skills that you can unlock but the hardest to unlock are the skill runes which extend up to level 60. In order to unlock the full potential of a skill, you need to replay in nightmare mode from level 32 after killing Diablo. The best thing is that none of these skills are permanent and you can switch them around if you like which makes the combat dynamic. Then there are four action bar skills assigned to the numbers on your keyboard. I think there should have been more stuff to tinker with instead of giving us one to four choices. Companion ability is whack and not worth expanding on. Getting rewards and trophies is OK
The best part of this game is the looting, randomly generated dungeons and a lot of monsters and the combat mechanics but everything I just mentioned depends on the internet working well (bandwidth). It means that Africans with slow internet do not really matter and it also means that this game is not for them. The truth is that it worked for me 70% of the time using 2 wireless 3G networks and these 2 networks are the most reliable which is Etisalat and Visafone, the latter being the most reliable by up to 80%. With Visafone 3G, you will constantly see green 70% of the time which means your latency is low.
As of writing this, auction house launched which is a way for blizzard to take all your money from the bank. The best part is buying weapons and various gears to equip your character. I could not care less about my companions; they don't die so I did not really care about buying gear for them, maybe once in a while. Auction house is addicting because you will always want a gear that is more powerful than what you wore a level ago but be prepared to spend a lot of money which makes blizzard a little greedy in my opinion.
Cutscene Cinematics are still top notch but the overall graphics is blah. 12 years in development and we could not get at least a direct x 10.1. I feel like my GTX 670 is wasted on this game, thankfully I have other games to tap the power of my GPU.
The best way to play this game is to be in a high bandwidth internet zone, invite people to join you which I did less because I believe they will just wreak havoc inside the game unless you knew people you were playing it with.
Summary rating: Story 7.0, Combat 9.0, Multiplayer 7.0
Diablo 3 is a good package with a lot of flaws and I will recommend waiting until blizzard removes their ridiculous DRM which will make the game much more enjoyable if it ever happens BUT if you feel like you have a faster internet connection, then by all means get Diablo 3.